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The Big Scene — Description

The chill of the September morning air only made Mikayla more nervous. It was her third week of the month-long internship at the embassy, and somehow she had gone from studying human culture to standing in the middle of a human neighborhood wearing a dress that seemed designed to leave as little to the imagination as possible.
Wonderful. This is what I’m going to remember about my great cultural experience.
A week earlier, she'd learned she'd been "loaned" to a movie company for several scenes in a film they were making. It would be filmed in black and white and in the style of a B movie from the 50s.
She'd done some acting in high school and had been pretty good at improv - at least compared with everyone else in her year.
Chase him. Catch him. Pretend to threaten to eat him.
She sighed. When she'd won the contest for eighteen-year-olds to spend a month on the human side of the portal, she'd imagined universities, outdoor cafés, and long conversations with people who could tell her what their world was really like. She'd been fascinated by other cultures for as long as she could remember, and human culture had become almost an obsession. While she'd never actually met a human before, she had several regular FaceTime contacts. Girls who seemed to enjoy sitting around gossiping with her. They'd been fun, but talking through a screen was hardly the same thing.
Her college application essay about her fascination with other cultures had been good enough to get her entered in the internship contest.
And now I'm standing here dressed like this.
She tried not to feel self-conscious as she towered over the nearby townhouses. The crew seemed remarkably busy pretending not to stare. Then Jake stepped out of his trailer and Mikayla's heart gave an embarrassing little jump.
Oh.
She had seen his pictures, of course, but somehow wasn’t prepared her for seeing him in person. He was handsome. Well - prettier-than-any-Brob-guy-she’d-met handsome. For years she'd had a private fantasy about human males. It had started around puberty and had always seemed safely impossible. Now a prime specimen was standing right there.
Don't stare. Don't stare. Don't stare.
Jake looked up and froze even though he knew she was going to be a Brob. This time the special effect was using a real girl. His first thought was that she looked like a cute eighteen year old His second was that cute girls weren't supposed to be seventy-five feet tall.
His mind immediately supplied the only comparison it could find: the forty-five-foot humpback he'd seen while whale watching two summers ago. The boat had gotten uncomfortably close, and even at a distance the whale had seemed enormous.
Mikayla was bigger - much bigger. And unlike the whale, she was looking directly at him.
She's going to pick me up, he thought, his stomach tightening. She's actually going to pick me up and act like she’s threatening me.
He forced himself to smile.
Mikayla smiled back, trying desperately to behave normally. She was physically attracted to him. There was no getting around it.
This is ridiculous.
One of her secret hopes for the internship had been to find a boyfriend. But Jake? Absolutely not. There were approximately a million reasons why that could never work. Unfortunately, none of them seemed to make him less attractive. Today, she had to chase him, catch him, and then sit beside a townhouse while pretending to frighten him by threatening to eat him.
The whole idea bothered her. Humans aren't even lunch-sized, she thought. And they're people. Real people. Still, it was only acting. The script said her character was putting Jake in his place, and that meant scaring him.
She just hoped he could make his fear convincing - she'd give it her all.
What she didn’t know was he hadn’t been told the about the part where she had to pretend to eat him. And she didn’t know that he didn’t know. The director thought it’d be more authentic.